The Latest: Colorado River Delta updatehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.7/the-latest-colorado-river-delta-update
Will an eight-week long experimental flood help restore an ecosystem?BackstoryOver the last 50 years, the Colorado River has rarely reached its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. The giant dams on its main stem and the water demands of some 35 million people have largely dried out its vast delta, which once sustained cottonwood and willow forests and armies of fish and birds. But in November 2012, the U.S and Mexico signed Minute 319, a complex water-sharing agreement that includes an experimental flood to help jumpstart the Delta's ecosystem, to be followed by smaller releases of water to sustain new growth ("New Hope for the Delta," HCN, 10/28/13).

FollowupOn March 23, officials opened the gates of Morelos Dam on the international border, and began the eight-week-long flood. Residents along the river's dry stretches came to splash in its renewed flow, which distributed tree seeds throughout the Delta and reached major restoration projects, just as scientists had hoped. It has yet to bee seen whether the water will reach the sea.

]]>No publisherWaterColorado RiverU.S. - Mexican Border2014/04/25 09:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCoast Guard blames Shell for beached Arctic drill righttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/coast-guard-blames-shell-for-beached-arctic-drill-rig
On New Year’s Eve, 2012, Royal Dutch Shell’s Kulluk drilling platform ran aground off a southern Alaskan island called Sitkalidak. Last week, the U.S. Coast Guard released a 152-page report dissecting the incident in minute detail and squarely pinning the blame on the oil company and its contractors.

The company had used the Kulluk – a 266-foot wide, conical-hulled drilling vessel completed in 1983 – for exploratory drilling off Alaska’s north coast that fall, then hitched it to a specialized ship called the Aiviq and sent it on Dec. 21 towards a Seattle shipyard for the winter. On the 1,700-mile journey along the coast from Captain’s Bay in the Aleutians, the two vessels were beset by a brutal, multi-day storm in the Gulf of Alaska, with up to 50-knot winds and 25-foot seas. On the 27th, the towline broke loose, and shortly after the crew managed to hook up an emergency line, the Aiviq’s engines failed.

A Coast Guard vessel soon arrived and tried to tow the Aiviq, still attached to the Kulluk, but its line snapped too. A second ship attempted to tow the Kulluk side-by-side with the Aiviq, during which the Coast Guard managed to helicopter evacuate the Kulluk’s 18 crewmembers, but then both towlines snapped. A tugboat then managed to establish an emergency towline on the 30th, allowing the Aiviq to get a line back on the rig on the 31st, only to lose it yet again. As the seas’ heaving worsened, the Coast Guard ordered the tugboat to cut the rig loose for the safety of its crew.

Though no one was hurt, and the Kulluk’s 139,000 gallons of diesel and 12,000 gallons of combined lubrication oil and hydraulic fluid stayed securely onboard, the incident added credence to environmentalist contentions that neither industry, nor the federal government, is ready for the risks of developing oil reserves beneath the harsh Arctic Ocean farther north.

"The most significant factor (contributing to the accident) was the decision to attempt the voyage during the winter in the unique and challenging operating environment of Alaska," wrote Coast Guard Seventeenth District Commander Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo, “demonstrating a lack of respect” for the challenging environment with an “inadequate determination of risk” and “ineffective risk management.” Worse, the company made the decision to move the rig to Seattle in part to avoid a multi-million dollar state tax bill, which would have been assessed Jan. 1 had it stayed in Alaskan waters.

----

Some of the report’s other findings:

-The Aiviq had had problems towing the Kulluk earlier that fall, including taking on water that damaged numerous systems and an electrical blackout that made the engine inoperable. Neither incident was reported to the Coast Guard, as required. The vessel may also have had ongoing incursion of seawater into its fuel oil, contributing to engine failure. All of this made it a questionable choice for a lone towboat.

-Shell’s operation’s manager was on vacation during the final tow planning process and the tow itself, leaving an employee who had been on staff for 6 months, hadn’t participated in any of the planning meetings, and had not received specialized training or even instructions from his supervisor, to sign off on the enterprise. “There is also no evidence that the plan was forwarded to any other federal or state entities for review or approval,” nor do there appear to be “any federal or state requirements to review or approve such plans.” Meanwhile, the crew was not especially experienced with towing in Alaska’s wintertime waters. The company’s contingency plans were also found to be inadequate.

-The Kulluk’s shape made it particularly vulnerable to rolling, dragging, and sudden accelerations in heaving seas, and its tall profile, to the grasp of high winds – swinging out from the side of the tow vessel like a “balloon on a string.” The tow configuration also allowed it to twist. With the violence of the storm, all of this added up to massive extra strain on towlines and other equipment, for both the Aiviq and the boats that came to its aid; none, including the Aiviq, had strong enough equipment to hold the rig under those conditions (which can be anticipated in the Gulf of Alaska, where winter storms are regular and violent).

-No complete assessment of the towing gear was conducted prior to the Aiviq’s departure.

“Shell ran through every single safety and common sense red light in moving this rig because of financial considerations,”Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., told the news website Fuel Fix. “This kind of behavior should raise major red flags for any future Arctic drilling plans.”

Three ships tow the Kulluk from Kiliuda Bay near Kodiak Island, Alaska, Feb. 26, 2013. Courtesy U.S. Department of Defense.

Except there now aren’t any plans on the immediate horizon in U.S. waters, and it’s looking increasingly unlikely that any will get underway at a significant scale for years, thanks in part to incidents like the Kulluk.

It was just one in a string of mishaps to plague Shell’s Arctic program in 2012, leading it to call off activities in 2013. ConocoPhillips shelved its own plans last April in the wake of the Interior Department’s Kulluk investigation. And after a federal appeals court ruled that the environmental analysis underpinning the original 2008 sale of Arctic Ocean leases to Shell and ConocoPhillips was inadequate late this January, Shell suspended its 2014 drilling program as well.

The international picture is similar, according to Bloomberg News. “Off the coast of Greenland, drilling has yet to resume after Cairn Energy spent $1 billion on exploration without making commercial finds in iceberg-ridden waters,” writes Bloomberg’s Mikael Holter and Niklas Magnusson, “while Russia’s Shtokman gas project, 370 miles from shore in the Barents Sea, has been stalled for years.”

“I don’t think we’ll see any oil production in the Arctic any time soon — probably not this decade and not the next,” Lundin Petroleum’s Ian Lundin, whose Sweden-based company operates in Norway, told Bloomberg in February. “The commercial challenges are too big.”

The biggest multinational oil companies may actually be rethinking mega-projects like Arctic drilling in general, at least in the short term, according to Petroleum Economist, since they’re currently spending out the nose just to keep production from declining:

ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and BP spent a staggering $686 billion from 2008 to 2013, with annual investment levels rising by about 50% over the same period…(Their) executives told investors that the increased spending would unlock new supplies and profits, but (their) total oil and gas production actually fell more than 3% (over the same period).

Some analysts believe this means the ground beneath the energy status quo is getting shakier. “The oil industry has faced more Black Swans since 2012 than perhaps any other time in its history, not only from geopolitical and severe weather events, but also from disruptive technologies,” Executive Director for Energy and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis Amy Myers Jaffe writes for Fuel Fix. “BP in its 2013 World Energy Outlook acknowledged the high likelihood that oil demand in the industrial economies has peaked. (It) also opened the door to the idea that exponential growth in oil demand in China might fail to materialize … and cited tremendous gains in energy efficiency, changing (transportation) patterns and a rise in shale gas and renewables as curbing the world’s future thirst for oil.”

Myers also notes that the tech boom still has plenty of techtonic shifts in store for the energy industry. “That change is likely to be faster and more transformational than most senior oil industry executives care to admit.”

Sarah Gilman is the associate editor of High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryOilAlaska2014/04/08 12:35:00 GMT-6ArticleFour women joyride the flood that will revive the Colorado River Deltahttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/clocked-by-the-pulse-four-women-joyride-the-flood-that-will-revive-the-colorado-river-delta
The guides warned us, of course. Or they sort of did.

It was sometime after the river outfitter’s shuttle van had passed through the latticework of gates and fences that guards the steep, hairpinned road to the boat-launch at the base of the Hoover Dam, and possibly right before we realized that we had left our two-burner stove back in Alison’s truck, in the parking lot of a casino hotel towering beigely over an otherwise nearly buildingless swath of desert around Lake Mead.

March 19 had dawned beautiful and bluebird in what we had dubbed Baja, Nevada – a 12-mile stretch of clear turquoise water with intermittent hotsprings through the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, where my three college lady friends and I planned to kayak at a luxuriantly sluggish pace for four days. Green rattlesnakes will chase you, the guides told us as we wound into the steep gorge. Scorpions will roost in your sandals. Brain-eating amoebas will Swiss-cheese your frontal lobes if you’re stupid enough to snort the hotspring water. And in the afternoon and at night, the water level can rise without warning as dam operators let more or less through Hoover’s hydroelectric turbines to feed fluctuating power demands in Arizona, Nevada and California. Make sure your gear is secure, the guides fingerwagged, and your kayaks well-tied overnight. Yes, of course, but the stove? we clamored. The eating of delicious things was, after all, a top priority. The guides exchanged glances. Tight federal security around the dam meant there would be no driving back for it. That left hoofing it out from the first side canyon, about a mile downriver.

Three hours later, Alison and I began the eight-mile roundtrip hike to the freeway and the hotel on the rim, while Sarahlee and Laura held down a campsite and explored an island in the middle of the river. The route was a spectacular scramble along sandy wash bottoms and up boulders and ragged fixed lines. Spring-fed ferns and algae wept down the canyon’s walls and an ankle-deep stream of hot water threaded its middle, curling periodically into deep, sand-bagged pools. By the time we had strapped the cornery bulk of the stove to my back, we were congratulating ourselves on the incredible luck of finding this place, and of finding a way to retrieve this key piece of gear. “Winning!” we called out with fist pumps. This battle cry would become our river-trip refrain, but it didn’t much jive with what had been happening down below.----

The magic disappearing island of Baja, Nevada.

When we arrived back at the river, we found not a tidy camp, but Laura and Sarahlee stripped from the waist down, wading out of what appeared to be much deeper, much faster water than we had left behind. The beach where we had casually left out a table, food bags and soft cooler had become river, the tree where we had tied our kayaks now well within its current. “I looked over from where I was paddling and the island was GONE!” Laura exclaimed as she and Sarahlee pulled our boats to the new shore. They pantomimed the harrowing process of fishing our gear from eddies and paddling it back upstream; somehow, they got all of it save Sarahlee’s beloved tea mug, a water-tight steel cylinder that’s traveled with her on river expeditions down the Grand Canyon, the Nile, the Futaleufu. But we’d take this, too, we decided. Against all odds, we had lost and regained both our stove and our food. “Winning!” We cried, pumping our fists some more.

And we aimed to keep winning, so we set our first camp far up the sidecanyon. As I filtered drinking water into our bottles that night, dangling my feet from a shelf of rock, the river rose and fell slowly, rhythmically, as if breathing – climbing over my toes, sliding up my shins, curving around my knees, pulling away, and again.

The following night, we were even more careful, setting camp in a sandy depression in a rock outcropping high above the river, which had the added bonus of shielding us from sight and earshot of a dozen or so canoeists camped at the mouth of the new sidecanyon below us. After dinner, we ate cookies on a little spit of basalt, watching with interest as the water began to climb again. First one foot. Then two. We looked over at our kitchen, set on a shelf several vertical feet below our sleeping bags, but still a few vertical feet above the river. Was it high enough? The water fingered its way up the rocks. Three feet now, and still rising in the deepening dark. We shuffled gear, shuffled it again, as the river crept over the small fire ring that had been under our table only an hour before.

Our cozy cubby hole in an outcrop well above the floodwaters.

Four feet, and acrid smoke from a river-swamped campfire flooded our outcropping. We peeked over the rocks to find our neighbors busily moving their tents, tables, chairs, coolers, even their flotilla of canoes, as the water poured slowly up their canyon. Their second campfire suddenly lifted into the air, floating backwards into the willows as they carried it to higher ground in its firepan. The sight was so surreal – a campfire appearing to move under its own power through the dark like a tiny flying saucer aflame – that I let out a guffaw, and several headlamps swiveled our way. We ducked, and Laura punched me in the arm. “You’re a terrible spy!” she hissed.

Later, as we slept in a pig pile beneath the stars, a light appeared from the rocks above us and scanned our faces, startling us blinking back awake. “Is everything okay?” I asked the disembodied light blearily. “Yes, yes,” the older man wearing it said, his glasses glinting weirdly as he informed us that his group had had to move their camp not one, but three times. “Are you staying dry?” he asked, hoping to commiserate. Before we could respond, though, he inexplicably disappeared into our kitchen for a few minutes to survey our setup, then sauntered back and plopped down as if this were a great time to chat: “Have you heard of Minute 319?”

It was an absurdly random thing to ask a group of sleeping women at 11 p.m. Being the argumentative know-it-all that I am, though, I propped up on my elbows, slid on my glasses, and engaged. Why, yes I had, I said, feeling Laura stiffen beside me, likely preparing another punch.

Just last fall, I edited a feature story about Minute 319 by former High Country News contributing editor Matt Jenkins. The landmark agreement between the U.S. and Mexico, finalized in late 2012, is meant to bring life back to the Colorado’s vast delta at the Sea of Cortez. The river is so overallocated, serving more than 35 million people on both sides of the border, that it has rarely reached the ocean over the past 50 years. But it once fed 3,000 square miles of cottonwood- and willow-shaded wetlands, pools and channels that sustained armies of birds and fish. A record flood of water in the epic snowpack year of 1983 revived it for a bit. Minute 319 aims to do the same, with a big pulse of water sent down the river from the very dams that have choked its flow. The simulated flood will hopefully jumpstart the ecosystem, and smaller pulses over the next five years, sustain its recovery.

Could these crazy river conditions be Minute 319? the man wanted to know. Surely the guides would have told us that, I responded, scraping my sleepy mind for a clear recollection of timing, and besides, I thought the flood was in April? Los Angeles had probably just turned on all its lights and hairdryers at once or something. And also, Alison broke in, we’d like to go back to sleep now. Goodnight? Finally taking the hint, he rose hastily and skulked away.

But the water failed to rise that much again for the rest of our blissful trip, even during the electricity frenzy that is Friday night. By the time I had arrived home to Paonia, Colo., that weekend and plugged back into the Interbrain, it was clear that our awkward visitor was right. We had unwittingly drifted atop, been flooded out by, drank from, and swam in one of the most momentous events in recent environmental history. Winning, indeed.

After sending us reeling the previous Wednesday and Thursday, those big pulses of water from Hoover had traveled more than 340 river miles southwest to the Morelos Dam on the international border. And on Sunday, March 23, officials opened the gates and loosed them into Mexico.

Matt Jenkins is on those newly flooding stretches of river as I write, documenting the water’s trickle back into its southerly veins and arteries, the Delta’s slow stretching of limbs back into life. When I called him this week to check in about how he plans to write up his findings for HCN (stay tuned for that next week), I filled him in on our trip mishaps. He laughed, we set a deadline. “Oh hey,” he added as I got ready to hang up, “I’ll keep an eye out for that mug.”

Sarah Gilman isthe associate editor of High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman

]]>No publisherWaterColorado RiverNevadaArizonaCaliforniaRecreationU.S. - Mexican BorderColorado2014/03/28 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA plague of tumbleweedshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.5/a-plague-of-tumbleweeds
A handy pamphlet on how to dig out from a tumbleweed takeover of sci-fi proportions.Tumbleweeds first engulfed J.D. Wright's house in southeastern Colorado Nov. 17. Wind gusted up and there they were, piled so deep over doors and windows that Wright's grandson had to dig him and his wife out with a front-end loader. "We had some bad weeds in the '50s and '70s (droughts)," Wright says, "but nothing like this."

The skeletal orbs, also known as Russian thistle, aren't newcomers; they wandered over from Eurasia in the 19th century. But Western drought has invigorated them as farmers fallow fields, ranchers stop grazing cattle that eat weed shoots, and native perennials wither. With so much bare soil, a burst of moisture last fall sparked a tumbleweed explosion. Now, packs of them scythe across the prairie, enthusiastically scattering seed. Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico have reported miles of blocked roads and weed mountains stacked behind fences and in ditches. A January windstorm buried a three-quarter-mile-by-half-mile section of Clovis, N.M., rooftop-to-rooftop in 435 tons of prickly mayhem.

The accumulation is more than inconvenient; it blocks emergency vehicles and boosts fire danger. But how the heck do you overcome a tumbleweed takeover of sci-fi proportions?

Exploit romantic Western mythology: Build a website and ask less than the typical $15 to $50 entrepreneurs charge for tumbleweed props and decorations. Advertise: “Locally grown, organic, free-range tumbleweeds!” Match promise to “SHIP ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!”

Pro: Income could fund restoration or weed removal.

Con: SPREAD SEED ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!

SEND IN THE PLOWS

Pro: Equipment already on hand.

Con: Simply makes bigger piles of tumbleweeds – at least, until the next wind. “We spent $70,000 just to shove these things around,” says Commissioner Tobe Allumbaugh of Crowley County, Colo., where weeds blocked 42 miles of road this winter.

THE SMASH-AND-CHEW

Jerry-rig a piece of farm equipment called a forage chopper to pulverize them. Call it, as Commissioner Allumbaugh does, a dinosaur.

Emulate Clovis, N.M.: Muster work crew of 25 to 50 from public works department and Air Force base, four front-end loaders and 15 dump trucks. Work eight 10-hour days; relocate tumbleweeds to landfill to be smashed and buried.

Pro: Complete weed annihilation.

Con: Slow, stabby work; expensive.

Sarah Gilman is the associate editor at High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman. Illustrations by Brian Taylor.

]]>No publisherWildlifeDroughtInfographic2014/03/21 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe Latest: Colorado first state to regulate methane emissionshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.5/the-latest-colorado-first-state-to-regulate-methane-emissions
Some oil and gas companies supported the rules. BackstoryFrom diesel exhaust to leaking pipelines and other infrastructure, oil and natural gas development releases methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2, sulfur and nitrogen compounds and toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like benzene. The latter two help form lung-damaging ozone. As drilling booms, Western gaspatch pollution sometimes rivals that of major urban areas. That's increased support for better state regulations and inspired some of the first federal rules governing hydraulic fracturing ("EPA aims to clean up polluted air in Western gas fields," HCN 9/5/11).

FollowupIn late February, Colorado became the first state to regulate the industry's methane emissions, and also tightened and expanded VOC rules. Though two industry trade groups fought those provisions, energy companies Anadarko, Noble and EnCana joined some environmental groups in support of the proposal. Officials estimate it will reduce annual VOC emissions by 92,000 tons, and methane by tens of thousands of tons.

]]>No publisherClimate Change2014/03/17 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAvalanches weren’t – and aren’t – only a backcountry threathttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/avalanches-werent-and-arent-only-a-backcountry-threat
In the handful of times I’ve visited Missoula, Montana, the grassy slopes of neighboring L- and M-emblazoned Mounts Jumbo and Sentinel have never looked any more threatening to me than the hogbacked foothills that yaw out of the ground west of Boulder, Colorado, my hometown. Velvety, yes. Curved like a set of relaxed shoulders, yes. Welcomingly draped in the low-angled sun of late afternoon, yes. Avalanche death zone? Not so much.

But on Feb. 28, an unusually intense blizzard snapped a wet quilt of deep snow over the valley, rumpling it into drifts and slabs with gusts up to 50 mph. Atop Jumbo and Sentinel, as well as the surrounding mountains, a weak crust of ice that unseasonably warm weather had glazed over the existing snowpack earlier in the week strained beneath the weight. When a group of snowboarders started down Jumbo – closed since November to protect a wintering elk herd – around 4 p.m., that strain released spectacularly. A large slab avalanche ran from near the mountain’s peak almost 1,300 vertical feet into a neighborhood on the valley floor, obliterating a two-story house, damaging several other homes and vehicles, and worst of all, burying three people. Over 100 first responders, search and rescue personnel, neighbors and volunteers converged on the area with shovels and probes to find and dig them out. All were recovered alive; one ultimately died from her injuries.

The Jumbo avalanche path of Feb. 2014, marked in red, in Missoula, Montana. Courtesy City of Missoula.

It was, according to most accounts, a freak accident. No one can remember a big slide coming down that path in the 60 to 80 years homes have been at its base, says Assistant Director of Missoula Development Services Don Verrue. In fact, any in-town avalanche fatality is kind of a freak thing these days; most folks unlucky enough to get caught (and it’s been a bad winter, with 22 killed to date) are far in the backcountry, chasing turns on fresh powder. But it wasn’t always that way: Avalanches used to exact their biggest toll on unlucky travelers, miners and mountain communities, not on farflung skiers.

The worst such event in U.S. history occurred March 1, 1910. During an epic snowstorm, blizzard-drifted snow and avalanches stranded two trains in the small Cascades mountain town of Wellington, Washington, about 85 miles east of Seattle. Then, the weather turned suddenly to rain and warm wind, sending a slide down in the middle of the night that knocked both trains – and the 50 passengers and 75 railroad employees sleeping on board – into a deep ravine. Ninety-six people died. Just three days later, Canada experienced its own superlative avalanche, when a slide in British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains killed 58 men clearing avalanched snow from a railroad line below Rogers Pass.

Train wreckage left by the 1910 slide in Wellington, Washington. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Colorado has also had its share of terrible accidents. The worst of these occurred at the Liberty Bell Mine above Telluride in 1902, when multiple slides claimed a dozen miners, and then the same number of would-be rescuers. According to a review of recorded avalanche fatalities in the state, assembled by Dale Atkins of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, 92 percent of the 442 people killed between 1859 and 1920 were those simply working and living in the mountains, the vast majority of them miners brought by the silver mining boom. But as mining waned and the ski industry and outdoor recreation came into their own as major economic drivers in the state, a new trend emerged. Between 1950 and 2006, 81 percent of the 210 people killed in avalanches were playing in the snow – climbing, skiing, snowshoeing and snowmobiling.

That’s still fewer than half the deaths of the mining years, despite massive increases in Colorado’s population and the number of people traveling through the mountains. Part of what’s changed, in Colorado and elsewhere, is that we’ve gotten better at predicting and mitigating avalanche danger, explains geotechnical engineer Chris Wilbur, who works on avalanche mitigation and land-use planning projects around the West. Instead of simply crossing fingers and whispering prayers when we drive over 10,662-foot Vail Pass, for example, we can trust in weather forecasters and snowpack monitors, the state highway department, which closes roads beneath slide paths when the danger is high, and the trusty folks who lob explosives onto overloaded slopes to release slides while those roads are closed, so that they can be cleared away without loss of life or limb.

There’s also now protective infrastructure in some of the most dangerous places – like tunnels at those northwestern carnage sites I mentioned earlier – that helps deflect or bypass snow. Wilbur is currently working with Washington state to replace an inadequate snowshed on Snoqualmie Pass – meant to channel avalanches safely over the interstate – with a six-lane bridge over the slide path. Officials expect the $71 million project to reduce road closures 10-fold, and thus reduce the massive economic disturbances associated with blocked freight and traffic, Wilbur says.

Several mountain communities, including Aspen and Pitkin County, San Juan County, Ophir, Vail and others in Colorado starting in the 1970s, Sun Valley and Ketcham, Idaho, and Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska, have also adopted avalanche zoning and land-use codes that prohibit structures or require building designs that can withstand avalanche forces in known active slide paths, depending on how frequent they are, Wilbur says. The codes are adapted from Swiss policies, with some key tweaks to accommodate Americans’ sense that private property rights are sacred above nearly everything else – for example, being less strict about how frequent slides need to be to prohibit building. The communities in Utah’s highly avalanche-prone Little Cottonwood Canyon, meanwhile, have “interlodge” warnings, requiring residents to shelter in avalanche-fortified buildings – for minutes, hours or even days – until officials declare it safe again after bombing surrounding slopes to set off slides.

Juneau may have the worst urban avalanche potential in the country, with 62 houses, a hotel and a harbor within an active slide area. “There’s the possibility of the most catastrophic avalanche disaster in American history if all things go the wrong way,” says city avalanche forecaster Tom Mattice. There’ve been many close calls – including a 1962 avalanche that damaged two dozen homes, tearing off roofs, buckling walls, breaking chimneys and windows – but as of yet no fatalities. The city now has codes in place to prevent new building in the worst spots. But since much of the area is already built out, its best option to head off disaster may simply be to buy out many of the area’s homeowners with the aid of federal hazard mitigation and disaster prevention grants – a prospect it’s now studying.

In the meantime, Juneau trains its fire department and other emergency responders in urban avalanche rescue, which involves everything from dealing with hazardous materials and dangerously unstable building debris to live electrical wires and spewing gas lines, not to mention all the usual probe-’n’-beacon stuff mountain enthusiasts are so familiar with.

Missoula’s Don Verrue says the city will emulate that part of Juneau’s approach to prepare for any future avalanches within its borders – which local forecasters say is a possibility, however remote. There’s just not usually enough snow to justify land-use code changes, Verrue explains.

Even so, the Missoula slide is a good reminder that we live in an uncertain, constantly shifting world – one where the right combination of weather and topography can quickly obliterate the artificial lines we’ve drawn between our orderly communities and chaotic forces of nature.

Sarah Gilman is High Country News’ associate editor. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBlog Post2014/03/11 12:55:00 GMT-6ArticleGoodbye, Hellohttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.4/goodbye-hello
Board of directors meeting, visits from friends and remembrances. In January, our board of directors gathered by phone and Web to talk with staff about High Country News' progress over the last four months. There's good news: Print and digital subscriptions are up 1,000 from last year, our coffers are bursting with end-of-year donations (thanks to all who contributed!), and our redesigned website should be ready before summer.

HCN bids fond farewell to departing board members Marley Shebala of Window Rock, Ariz., and Annette Aguayo of Albuquerque, N.M. Both championed our coverage of environmental justice issues, including those facing Native Americans. We're grateful for their vision and the time they invested in us.

RemembranceWe were saddened to hear of the recent passing of Art Ortenberg. Art and his late wife, fashion icon Liz Claiborne, lived part-time in Montana for decades and founded the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation to invest in conservation. Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society and a personal friend, describes Art and Liz as wildlife lovers who were "also deeply respectful of local communities and their ties to the land. They believed that if you invested in local, collaborative efforts that sought common ground, both nature and people could win. And win big. In the process, they helped redefine conservation in the West and internationally."

Visitors Botanists Hannah Stevens, of Paonia, Colo., and Sarah Hunkins, of Cave Creek, Ariz., met years ago while working at the New York Botanical Garden. Now that they've both migrated West, the friends reconvened this winter in Paonia to cross-country ski, soak in hot springs and – the icing on an already yummy-sounding cake – tour HCN's office.

Subscribers Judith Hildinger and Eric Meader of San Luis Obispo, Calif., stopped by in early January while visiting family, but couldn't linger: The aforementioned family members were waiting outside in the cold. The pair popped in just long enough to say hello and ensure that we got their names down for Dear Friends.

CorrectionThanks to Hank Hassell, principal catalog librarian at Northern Arizona University and author of Rainbow Bridge: An Illustrated History, for catching an error in Paul VanDevelder's Feb. 3 op-ed "Between a rock and a dry place." The essay, Hassell points out, states that " 'Brower ... single-handedly led the fight against building Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. And lost.' In fact, Brower and the Sierra Club never fought Glen Canyon Dam. They fought Echo Park and Whirlpool Canyon Dams on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, and Marble and Bridge Canyon Dams on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon – and won. The subsequent battle Brower waged as founder and president of Friends of the Earth was to save Rainbow Bridge National Monument from being flooded by the waters of Lake Powell, a consequence of Glen Canyon Dam expressly prohibited by the statutes authorizing the Colorado River Storage Project."

]]>No publisherCommunitiesDear Friends2014/03/03 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleColorado first in the nation to regulate oil and gas industry’s methane emissions http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/colorado-first-in-the-nation-to-regulate-oil-and-gas-industrys-methane-emissions
The home of the West’s most pitched battles over oil and gas development is once more in the news for major energy policy reforms. On February 23, Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission voted in significantly stricter statewide rules governing air pollution from oil and gas development, including the nation’s first state-level controls on the industry’s emissions of methane – a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

The rules, which officials will begin implementing this year, “require companies to detect leaks and fix them (and) install devices that capture 95 percent of emissions — both volatile organic compounds and methane,” reports Bruce Finley for the Denver Post. State officials estimate that they will reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds (or VOCs), which contribute to the formation of lung-damaging, smog-making ozone, by 92,000 tons, and methane, by tens of thousands of tons. The measures are part of the state’s efforts to bring the urban area’s air into compliance with federal health standards.

Air quality hasn’t been helped by a recent drilling revival, driven in part by advances in the oil and gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, wherein a mix of water, sand and chemicals are fired into the ground to stimulate hydrocarbon production. With rigs moving closer to more communities, several have banned or otherwise voted to restrict the practice in hopes of avoiding accompanying air and water pollution, as well as public health impacts. A recent study in Environmental Health Newshas stoked those fears with the finding that women who live near gas wells in rural Colorado are more likely to have babies with congenital heart and neural tube birth defects.

A banner obscures the state capital building at an anti-fracking rally in October, 2012.

With many enviros staking out hardline positions – calling for more local bans and even a statewide moratorium on fracking – the state, the industry and some environmental groups have been working to find common ground on how to lesson industry’s impacts. The new air quality rules are a good example, brokered as they were with the Environmental Defense Fund and the major energy companies Anadarko, Noble and EnCana.

But not everyone is on board: fracktivist tweets during last week’s rulemaking hearings called environmentalists supporting the proposal sellouts. And as I reported last month, the state’s two major industry trade associations, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association and the Colorado Petroleum Association, had objected to major parts of the rules, arguing that the commission didn’t have the authority to regulate methane and was unfairly singling the industry out for its greenhouse gas emissions. They also argued that the parts of the rules that crack down on emissions of VOCs should continue to apply only in parts of the state that have been officially designated as zones with significant air quality problems, rather than being extended throughout the state. That would have essentially meant that energy companies would be allowed to pollute more in areas with cleaner air.

Coming from COGA, at least, the position seemed like a bit of an about-face, given CEO Tisha Schuller’s recent work to up the industry’s environmental cred from within. And fortunately for the rules’ advocates, the groups never got much traction, despite hours of fraught testimony. The rule proposal passed 8-1, with the methane provisions staying intact on a 5-4 vote, and the statewide provisions, on a healthier 7-2 margin. "Everything in our proposal is a common-sense thing (industry) can do," Garry Kaufman, deputy director of the state health department's air pollution division, told EnergyWire. "It's not causing some kind of existential threat for the industry in Colorado."

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryBlog Post2014/02/25 11:10:00 GMT-6ArticleRanchers, enviros and officials seek a middle path on public-land grazinghttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.3/ranchers-enviros-and-officials-seek-a-middle-path-on-public-land-grazing-in-utah
Moving beyond stalemate to meaningful reform in Utah.If you had never heard them talk about one another, you might assume Mary O'Brien and Bill Hopkin were enemies.

Hopkin, a sturdy 68-year-old with a shock of white hair, grew up stringing fence and tending cows in conservative, pro-ranching northern Utah. Now the grazing management specialist for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, he says he's still "at my best when I'm talking over the hood of a pickup." Cattle, he fervently believes, can help rangelands thrive.

O'Brien, also 68, is elfish and unflinchingly direct, with a big laugh. She grew up in Los Angeles, devouring Willa Cather's books and falling so in love with grasslands that she would later encourage ecology students to honor native plants by thinking of each as a person. Before joining the Grand Canyon Trust, she earned an anti-grazing reputation for arguing against introducing cows to areas formerly grazed by sheep in Hells Canyon, on the Idaho-Oregon border.

Last May, at Kanab's Amazing Earthfest, O'Brien's husband mentioned that they had been married for 45 years. "I am so sorry," Hopkin cut in. But instead of spite, his tone revealed affection and respect developed working with O'Brien to improve public-lands grazing in Utah. Though federal managers say reforms in the '60s and '70s helped heal lands damaged by settlement's grazing free-for-all, conditions on southern Utah's three national forests, the Dixie, Fishlake and Manti-La Sal, have since largely plateaued. Ninety-seven percent of their land is grazed, and roughly on the same schedule, regardless of various ecosystems' needs. As a result, biodiversity and water quality have suffered, and environmentalist lawsuits and appeals have piled up.

O'Brien and Hopkin were in Kanab to showcase a different approach: A collaboration as unlikely as Earthfest's own celebration of public lands, where yogis rub shoulders with motorheads in a county best known for opposing public-land protection.

In 2012, Hopkin, O'Brien and a dozen other diverse stakeholders hammered out recommendations to make grazing on southern Utah's national forests more ecologically sustainable, while still economically viable. That they reached consensus is surprising, given environmentalists' historic opposition to public-lands ranching and ranchers' reluctance to embrace restrictions on an already difficult business. That it happened in Utah – where O'Brien's name is practically an epithet among many ranchers – is remarkable.

But it also happened because of that dynamic. Managers and moderate environmentalists say they must build social capital to get beyond stalemate to meaningful reform, especially as the Dixie, Fishlake and Manti-La Sal move this summer to overhaul their grazing policies.

"If I want a durable solution, I need as many people to own a piece of it as possible," saysFishlake National Forest Supervisor Allen Rowley, who will lead that effort. Adds Harv Forsgren, who championed grazing reform as the regional forester overseeing Utah, Nevada and parts of Wyoming, Idaho and California: "I think it's a turning point."

Reforming grazing policy has always been tricky in the West, given ranching's outsized political and cultural clout. Livestock nosh grass on about 80 percent of Bureau of Land Management holdings, and 60 percent of national forests. For nearly two decades, the Grand Canyon Trust's now-Executive Director Bill Hedden has tried to ease that pressure on the Colorado Plateau, including by working directly with willing Utah ranchers and officials to retire grazing leases and remove cows from federal land. But that did nothing for still-grazed land, and agency support for retirements in Utah eroded during George W. Bush's tenure, Hedden says. "The basic public-lands grazing work there backed way off."

Hoping to spur broader change, O'Brien, an ecologist, began collecting data on damage the Trust and others wanted to repair. What volunteers found across the three southern Utah forests was disturbing: Livestock and wild ungulates appeared to be chewing aspen stands to death. Big trees persisted, but shoots weren't surviving to become saplings. The same was true of cottonwoods and willows. Armed with this, O'Brien helped stir up a collaborative group in 2009 that produced aspen restoration guidelines that included modifying grazing. It was on that project that she and Hopkin bonded over their concern for Utah's landscape. "When I saw some of the aspen, I was devastated," Hopkin says.

Forsgren and Rowley saw an opportunity in the aspen group and others. "There was a nucleus of players we might be able to build something with," Forsgren says, including state officials who agreed the status quo was unsustainable.

In late 2011, Utah's then-Agriculture Commissioner Leonard Blackham and Department of Natural Resources Director Mike Styler carefully picked stakeholders with a variety of perspectives and tasked them with finding common ground on how to make grazing better. Representatives from universities, state and federal agencies, local government, the woolgrowers' and cattlemen's associations, hunting and conservation groups, and, of course, the Trust, took part. As a starting point, everyone had to recognize grazing as a valid use of public land and acknowledge its impacts. Nobody's concerns could be ignored or voted down: Solutions had to be unanimous to make the group's report.

At first, meetings were tense. Then-Wayne County Commissioner Tom Jeffery received angry calls from other local officials for participating because "they thought it was to do away with grazing."

It wasn't until the group got out on the ground that trust grew. On one field trip, they visited an area that was battered even though cattle had been fenced out – validating ranchers' claim that they sometimes get blamed for impacts beyond their control. O'Brien "recognized that elk were doing damage," says fourth-generation rancher Dave Eliason, former president of the Utah Cattlemen's Association. "I'm pro-aspen," explains O'Brien. "I don't care who's overbrowsing it."

On a separate trip to Nevada, Hopkin, O'Brien and two other members toured a project where ranchers and the BLM had restored a riparian area simply by changing the grazing regime. "What made Mary breathe hard was when she saw the beaver dams," laughs Hopkin. "She was looking over the edge of the stream and I heard her say under her breath, 'Holy shit.' " Afterward, they shared before-and-after pictures of a once shallow, muddy channel now verdant with willows and bursting with life. "For Mary to stand up in front of Dave Eliason and say, 'They never reduced (cattle) stocking,' " Hopkin recalls, "was a huge social change for the entire group."

The group's report, released quietly in December 2012, lays out indicators that, with simple monitoring methods anyone can use, would help give a more comprehensive picture of forest health in grazed areas, from plant diversity to stream macroinvertebrates, as well as economic and social indicators, such as meat production and whether the Forest Service is including multiple stakeholders in decisions. The report also suggests grazing changes to better account for ecosystem needs, depending on what monitoring reveals and what's feasible for ranchers –– grouping grazing leases together to manage at a landscape scale, for example, or resting pastures, especially during growing season, even creating reference areas without livestock grazing to better assess its effects.

"What we have is a representative agreement that grazing is appropriate, but not everywhere, all the time, " Rowley says. He won't speculate on how the report will shape the upcoming policy changes, but points to south-central Utah's Monroe Mountain as an example of the sort of innovations he'd like them to encourage.

There, another collaborative co-chaired by O'Brien and Hopkin is applying the 2009 aspen group's recommendations. In addition to prescribed burns and some logging, the Fishlake National Forest's Richfield Ranger District is overseeing installation of extra fence and tanks, troughs and pipelines to help it manage three allotments, totaling 56,000 acres, as a unit. The increased number of watered pastures will allow ranchers to move livestock more often and vary the times they graze certain areas, in theory helping protect streams, as well as giving some high-elevation pastures a much-needed rest. There, researchers will be able to single out what role elk and deer play in the aspen's troubles. They'll also monitor whether the changes help boost aspen. If not, the district will further tweak livestock grazing, or work with the state to reduce wildlife browsing.

"I don't know if the Forest Service would have gotten to this type of proposal on our own," says District Ranger Jason Kling. "And we certainly wouldn't have the same support."

But it's unclear how well such methods would translate to other spots. The infrastructure and monitoring cost $675,000, including $145,000 in federal funds – too much for ranchers to shoulder on their own, says Will Talbot, who runs sheep on Monroe when not working full-time for the county road department to make ends meet. The cost of maintaining new infrastructure also has ranchers apprehensive, and it takes extra work and employees to get animals settled in new grazing patterns. That will be a squeeze if managers make them reduce their herds.

The expense is a significant sticking point for environmentalists outside the Monroe group. "Why should we industrialize public lands for livestock production, especially if it requires big subsidies to do so?" asks Jonathan Ratner, who watchdogs Utah, Wyoming and Colorado for the Western Watersheds Project, the environmental group ranchers are wariest of. "If you wanted to open a pizzeria, would you expect the federal government to supply the oven, hire the people for you, buy the flowers?"

O'Brien concedes that she has "real questions about propping up grazing," but adds that Monroe will help untangle what strategies produce real results, and enable the public to judge if the infrastructure is worth it. Hopkin thinks it is, given public-land ranching's place in rural economies and culture, and the ecosystem benefits he believes ranching provides. At a 220,000-acre ranch he managed for the Mormon Church, for example, Hopkin says a carefully calibrated grazing plan helped increase wildlife and plant diversity and improve stream condition, even as herd size increased, ultimately boosting livestock and hunting profits.

Whatever happens, change is afoot in Utah. "There are rare people in the agencies who recognize these issues," says the Trust's Hedden. The key will be maintaining momentum: Forsgren retired last January, though he now works on the same issues for Trout Unlimited, and his successor, Nora Rasure, supports the sustainable grazing group's approach. Hopkin is partially retired. O'Brien frets over what will happen when he leaves. "When he walks into a room, he shakes hands with everybody, he makes self-deprecating jokes. He really models to other ranchers how you can talk to environmentalists without a whole lot of pain."

She says she won't retire any time soon, though. "There's too much good that comes out of this work. Now, all you have to say is, 'Hey, people can talk. It's worked before.' Every time there's one of these collaborations, it's clearer that the days are over in Utah where just (ranchers) and the agency make the calls on grazing."

Sarah Gilman is HCN's associate editor.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsWildlifeUtahRanching2014/02/25 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleTroubleweeds: Russian thistle buries roads and homes in southeastern Coloradohttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/troubleweeds-russian-thistle-buries-roads-and-homes-in-southeastern-colorado
J.D. Wright pauses to check in with his wife of 51 years. “Do you remember, Mama, when that wind was?” After a few minutes perusing her cellphone photos, she reports back: Tumbleweeds first buried the house on November 17. The gusts screamed up and there they were, piled so deep over the doors and windows that Wright, who has a ranch on the Crowley-Pueblo County line in southeastern Colorado, had to call his grandson to come dig the couple out with a front end loader and pitchfork.

Since then, the house has been completely buried twice more, and partially buried five or six times. On one trip to town for groceries and a doctor’s visit, so many tumbleweeds clogged the road home that the couple didn’t make it back until the following day. “We had some bad weeds in the ‘50s and the ‘70s” – both decades saw serious dry spells – “but nothing like this,” says Wright, whose family has been on the place since 1950. They had always managed to keep running cows then, for example. The latest drought, though, has forced them to sell their 125-head herd and get by on income from odd jobs and Wright’s truck and equipment repair shop.

The Wrights’ story is not unusual on Colorado's corner of the Southern High Plains these days. “That neck of the woods has had a significant tumbleweed issue for a couple of decades,” in part because farmers are fallowing fields as they sell their water rights to growing Front Range cities, leaving bare dirt and little financial incentive to control weeds, explains Eric Lane, director of the state Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Services Division. Meanwhile, an extreme drought has hammered both cultivated fields and grasses and forbs on unplowed ground over the past three years, rolling huge dust storms over the state line into Oklahoma and Kansas. And because tumbleweeds are annuals, their seeds can colonize all that denuded soil in response to changing conditions much more quickly than the native perennials. When a big deluge of rain finally hit the area last fall, the tumbleweed population exploded, sending vagabond skeletons scything over the prairie with each passing cold front, dispersing seed hither and yon.

Tumbleweeds clog a road fenceline to fenceline all the way to the horizon.

The exotic plant, also known as Russian thistle for its Eurasian roots, was accidentally imported into the United States in the 19th century. It has clogged 42 miles of roads in Crowley County alone since last fall. In the most extreme case, tumbleweeds piled fenceline to fenceline over a road to a depth of seven feet for six miles.

The accumulation is more than inconvenient: It blocks emergency vehicle access and boosts fire danger around homes and outbuildings. “Have you ever seen a tumbleweed burn?” asks Crowley County Commissioner Tobe Allumbaugh. “It’s like a dried-up Christmas tree on steroids – just PHOOO!”

At first the county tried plowing them, which was “like trying to round up balloons,” Allumbaugh told High Country News a few weeks ago. And then the weeds were still piled up, free to blow back in and block things up, or worse, catch fire. The county could sell them on eBay, he joked, but that would only drop the bottom out of the already very niche-y tumbleweed Web market (and yes, people do sell them). Meanwhile burning them, while effective, also comes with significant risk of backfiring. So a county rep drove eight hours roundtrip to Kansas to buy a combine-like piece of farm equipment called a forage chopper. For the next two weeks, road department staffers swapped out parts and experimented until they thought they had a passable weed-annihilating machine – Allumbaugh lovingly refers to it as a dinosaur – that sucks the prickly orbs into a hopper and pulverizes them. But with the recent snows, the county hasn’t been able to set the beast loose on the biggest clogs. “As of last Friday, we’d spent $71,000 to just to shove these things around,” Allumbaugh says. “And they’ll come back tomorrow. They’re very friendly little animals.”

Snowplows tackle tumbleweeds in southeastern Colorado.

With the tumbleweed problem still looming large, Action 22, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of southern Colorado’s local governments and businesses, pulled together a meeting a couple of weeks ago to give communities an opportunity to share stories and weed-whacking tips. A Pueblo steel mill contractor relayed that the company had spent $300,000 removing the weed from its water ditches; someone else told how emergency personnel had to rescue people from yet another house that had been submerged by weeds in West Pueblo. Some spoke of baling tumbleweeds and mixing them with alfalfa for cattle feed; others were cautiously burning them or grinding them up and spreading them around. Nothing had yet proved a perfect solution. “Maybe we could just tell the Russians to come back and pick them up,” laughs Action 22 President Cathy Garcia, who is now looking for state and federal programs that communities may apply to for assistance in tackling the tumbleweed plague.

One of Crowley County's dinosaur weed choppers at work.

For his part, J.D. Wright has been piling the Russian thistle cleared from around his house in a vacant lot to the south. But his outbuildings and equipment are still in the weeds, so to speak, and some of his interior fences are holding back 100-foot-wide tangles of the prickly stuff. “There are maybe 30 families out here, and everybody has spent a couple hundred hours in everybody else’s yard cleaning these weeds out so people can get in and out,” Wright says. He hopes that he’ll be able to burn them come spring, with some water trucks on hand in case things get out of control – provided the local soil conservation district can get ahold of the money to help pay for them and other tumbleweed wrangling equipment. For now, though, “There aren’t any efficient methods of getting rid of them,” he says. “And they’re just generally raising Cain.”

Sarah Gilman is associate editor at High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman. Images courtesy Crowley County.

]]>No publisherWildlifeBlog Post2014/02/11 15:26:31 GMT-6ArticleDrought brings new dust storms to the geographic heart of the Dust Bowlhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.2/drought-brings-new-dust-storms-to-the-geographic-heart-of-the-dust-bowl
Despite an infusion of moisture, pockets of the Southern High Plains have been plagued with dusters and inundated with tumbleweeds.A dust storm hit, an' it hit like thunder;It dusted us over, an' it covered us under;Blocked out the traffic an' blocked out the sun,Straight for home all the people did run…

That's how folksinger Woody Guthrie described the walls of airborne earth that rolled across the Texas Panhandle during the drought-ravaged 1930s. But he could easily have been singing about the duster that blew into western Oklahoma's Cimarron County, the geographic heart of the Dust Bowl, from southeastern Colorado this Jan. 12. "From a distance, it looked like a storm coming in, but it was all dirt," says the local conservation district's Iris Imler, and gusts surpassing 50 mph piled so many tumbleweeds in Boise City that at least one road had to be plowed.

Despite a much-needed infusion of moisture last fall, pockets of the Southern High Plains are still locked in such extreme drought that topsoil from farm fields and some rangelands takes flight with every strong, sustained wind. And while the decades of the '30s and the '50s had more total drought years, Colorado state climatologist Nolan Doesken says a Rocky Ford weather station shows that, so far, the last three years are the three driest in a row in that town's recorded history. Meanwhile, since October, drifts of tumbleweeds have blocked 42 miles of roads in Crowley County, Colo. "The 12 counties around us are just as inundated," says commissioner Tobe Allumbaugh, and clearing them isn't easy: "It's like trying to round up balloons."

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeDroughtColorado2014/02/03 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleL.A. is here to stayhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.1/l-a-is-here-to-stay
Why would any magazine editor include Los Angeles in a special issue on environmental sustainability? Paul set his mug of wine down and glowered at me over his glasses. Los Angeles? Why would any magazine editor include Los Angeles in a special issue on environmental sustainability?

My friend and former professor had good reason to ask. The camper Paul calls home, where I had stopped for dinner that October night, is parked on the upper edge of the sprawling sage-furred desert of California's Owens Valley. In the early 1900s, L.A. drained the water from Owens Lake, about 80 miles south of here, to feed its own booming growth and glitz. Its thirst left behind toxic dust storms and a bitter grudge among the area's rural residents.

I encountered similar sentiments when I told others about the stories of urban environmental innovation I was editing for High Country News' annual Future issue. Las Vegas? A city like that in a desert is a crime against nature, an environmentalist friend scoffed to me at the local brewery. Phoenix? That, too. Even our student-writing contest got a rise: "While I am very interested in writing an essay that would further our efforts to achieve sustainability in Western Colorado, there is one big problem," wrote one prospective participant. "A modern industrial society will NEVER be sustainable (here). Virtually all our essential supplies are imported from outside our area."

These folks are, in part, reacting to the use and abuse of the already vague word "sustainability" for corporate greenwashing. But they're also right. It's impossible to argue that places like Vegas and L.A. and Phoenix and even the West's far-flung small towns don't have massive impacts. Put lots of people anywhere, especially an arid anywhere, and you're going to deplete local water sources or obliterate native species or compromise air quality or spew greenhouse gases. You will probably do all of the above. Even so, concluding that a community is inherently unsustainable, that its very existence is historically and environmentally wrong, leads to some tricky ethical places once you try to move beyond intellectual exercise to concrete action.

No one is simply going to declare, "No more Vegas," and bulldoze the place, any more than anyone is going to force people to stop having too many babies. And it would be quite a struggle to find a community that isn't chugging along in precarious opposition to its immediate surroundings in some way. Think of the epic flash floods and fires on Colorado's Front Range, San Francisco's earthquakes, the Arctic vortex that recently inhaled the Midwest and Northeast.

Any meaningful conversation about how to solve the West's, and the world's, environmental ills has to start with the recognition that our Vegases and Phoenixes and L.A.s aren't going anywhere. That they will likely only grow. That, in fact, the planet's most gluttonous country's most gluttonous cities may be some of our best laboratories for new ideas, as they are already colliding with very real resource limitations.

We should remember the Owens Valleys of our past, lest we repeat the same mistakes in our future. But we should also remember that most historic wrongs will forever be impossible to undo. There's no going back: What we have is what we have to work with. What we build from it now is up to us.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEditor's noteEssays2014/01/20 22:41:24 GMT-6ArticleIf the gas industry wants enviro cred, it should embrace methane regulationhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/oil-and-gas-industry-attacks-colorados-attempt-to-reduce-methane-leaks
Shift more of the nation off coal-powered electricity and onto that supplied by natural gas, and what do you get? A significant reduction in the carbon emissions driving the alarming climatic shifts we already experience in our daily lives. That’s the theory anyway, based on the fact that natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide that coal does when burned. And if you put aside concerns about drilling’s impacts to air and water quality, it’s an important one, since this electricity switch may account for a significant portion of the overall decrease in U.S. greenhouse gas releases that’s occurred over the last few years.

Trouble is, the climate benefits of natural gas hinge on just how much is leaking from the wells, pipelines, compressor stations and other infrastructure used to extract and deliver the fuel. But due to the paucity of comprehensive data, the large margins of error in the findings and the wildly disparate conclusions of various researchers, nobody’s quite sure what the percentage is. Methane, natural gas’s primary component, is a vastly more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, though more short-lived; as Sarah Keller reported for High Country News last summer, as little as 3 percent loss could cancel out the emissions reductions achieved by moving from coal to gas. Recent studies certainly don’t stoke confidence. One based on thousands of actual air samples, published in the The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, concluded that U.S. methane emissions were actually 1.5 times higher than previously thought, and that those for the oil and gas industry in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas were 5 times higher, reports The New York Times.

An infrared camera picks up methane and volatile organic compounds leaking from a tank. Image courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Given this, you’d think the industry would be falling all over itself to do away with leaks and thus help ensure its place in the U.S. energy pantheon long into the future, as well as improve its dismal public image. Presenters and attendees at an industry conference I went to last summer certainly beat the hey-enviro-hypocrites-we’re-reducing-greenhouse-gases! drum almost to the point of being annoying. And when President Obama made natural gas a key part of his climate strategy, energy companies and trade groups were more than happy to toot their horn.

You even might think that the industry, which in some cases is becoming more openly environmentally progressive in response to public concerns about hydraulic fracturing, would embrace Colorado’s landmark proposal to rein in fugitive methane emissions from oil and gas operations, announced last fall as part of a larger effort to tighten air quality rules. After all, doing so would make the industry’s recent concern about climate change seem more, um, well, genuine.

So is it? Nope.

Last Monday, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA) and the Colorado Petroleum Association filed documents with the state’s Air Quality Control Commission arguing that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate methane and that doing so as proposed is inappropriate, unjustified and unfairly singles out the oil and gas industry for its greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the trade groups suggest that the parts of the rules that crack down on emissions of volatile organic compounds (or VOCs), which contribute to the formation of lung-damaging, smog-making ozone, should apply only in parts of the state that have been officially designated as zones with significant air quality problems. That essentially means that energy companies would be allowed to pollute more in areas with cleaner air. (The rulemaking hearing will be February 19 to 21 at the Aurora Municipal Center in Aurora, Colo.; other prehearing statements can be found here.)

"COGA supports many aspects of the rule,” spokesman Doug Flanders said diplomatically in a statement, which suggested the proposal would cost $100 million, far more than Colorado’s analysis found. “We are committed to continuing the good work we have accomplished with state regulators to ensure our air stays clean while allowing this critical industry to responsibly develop oil and natural gas — a product each one of us are using right now.”

Sorry guys… you can’t have it both ways. If you want to claim that the fuel is a key part of the solution to climate change, you can’t just expect the public to buy that all companies are going to voluntarily tackle the leak issue. “Responsibly” developing natural gas is going to take tight regulation to ensure that it’s a bridge fuel to a cleaner energy economy rather than a bridge to nowhere.

As Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor John Deutch, who chaired the Obama administration's panel evaluating the risks of fracking, has observed, the industry’s reluctance to be transparent about the chemicals used in the drilling process has hurt companies more than it’s helped them, exploding into massive public backlash and a nationwide fracktivist movement. After all, if the formulas are safe, why must companies hide their composition, trade secret or not? "The industry, by saying, 'We're going to hold something back,' is paying a cost," Deutch told EnergyWire last week.

Now, it looks like it’s making a similar mistake with methane. I guess that’s another one to file under #missedopportunity.

Sarah Gilman is associate editor of High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryBlog Post2014/01/15 06:00:00 GMT-6Article2013 in environmental news, from the darkest to the most hopefulhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/a-solstice-exercise-2013-in-environmental-news-from-the-darkest-to-the-most-hopeful
A few weeks ago, High Country News contributing editor Craig Childs dropped me a note asking for some help with his annual winter solstice production, Dark Night. Would I write and read a series of poems about descending into darkness – specifically “death, ice, fear, what is inside the deep, blue, scarier crevasses of your mind” – and then wrap up with one that clawed its way back out into exuberance or revelation or some such?

It is the purpose of the show, after all, to nod to all the dark in the world on the darkest night of the year, even as performers call back the light by sharing stories, music and a big thrasher of a dance party.

In these first lightening days after solstice, then, this seems a fitting frame to apply to some of the year’s biggest Western environmental stories. And if you care about how the burning of fossil fuels contributes to climate change, 2013 has been a dark year indeed. Advances in technologies like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have cracked once troublesome shale formations and caused oil and natural gas production to surge, in the West drawing from big plays like North Dakota’s Bakken formation, Colorado’s Niobrara, the Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas, and, coming down the pike, California’s Monterrey shale. According to the federal Energy Information Administration’s 2014 energy outlook, U.S. crude oil production will likely average 7.5 million barrels per day for 2013, the highest since 1991, and by 2016 will break 9.5 million barrels per day, nearing and later possibly slightly surpassing the U.S.’s all time peak production level, set in 1970. Meanwhile the EIA anticipates a 56 percent increase in natural gas production over 2012 levels by 2040.

That explosive growth led many energy experts to declare dead and irrelevant the theory of Peak Oil – the point where global oil production will max out and then steadily decline, necessitating the development of alternative fuels and approaches to transportation, now a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

In some ways all of this is good news: The U.S. is cruising towards the holy grail of energy independence, oil patch communities have been a flamingly bright spot in our otherwise guttering economy, and, in theory, we no longer have to scramble to innovate in the face of apocalyptic scenarios involving the steep decline of our favorite drug, good old crude. Except these developments also further forestall urgently needed action to curb the emissions that are warming our planet – a much larger threat to our economy in the long run than a waning fossil fuel industry could ever be. And the U.S. is encouraging yet more drilling by steadily moving towards exporting its hydrocarbons, permitting liquid natural gas terminals and even considering lifting its moratorium on exporting domestic oil.

Meanwhile, the dearth of pipeline infrastructure to move this new oil to market has meant a giant increase in train traffic, with sometimes tragic and explosive results, including a Bakken oil train derailment that killed nearly 50 people and incinerated nearly 40 buildings in Quebec. And while Americans are driving less and using a lot less gasoline than they once did, we still consume vastly more gas per capita than everyone else, with the average U.S driver being equivalent to “three Germans. Or at least 6 or 7 Frenchmen,” as Jordan Weissmann writes for The Atlantic.

As drilling intensifies in existing oil and gas fields and moves into previously untouched communities and habitats, accompanying air and water pollution, wildlife declines, and other impacts will continue to escalate across the West. And then, of course, there’s its contribution to our increasingly apocalypticclimate outlook, which is already showing itself in the region’s dying forests.

Many of 2013’s other natural disasters offer hints of what to expect more of in our warmer future, as well. Record-setting drought gripped the Southwest, which was then scoured by massive, deadly flash floods, from Colorado’s Front Range all the way into Arizona. As the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to 35 million people, passed the 14th year of its own record-setting drought, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation warned that the first ever shortage declaration on the river could occur as soon as 2015 or 2016, triggering water restrictions for Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.

Yosemite’s high-profile Rim Fire offered a stark reminder that no precious landscape is immune to disasters like these, just as the deaths of 19 firefighters in Arizona’s Yarnell Hill Fire – the worst burnover toll in recent memory – made clear that our abilities to contain and control such terrible conflagrations are limited at best, and that these operations can be dangerously flawed.

So… how to climb out of this deep dark hole we’ve dug? I’ll tell you, thanks to the media’s proclivity for negative stories (HCN not excluded), it was rather more of a scrounge to find the good news of 2013 amidst all the exploding train cars and melting starfish.

The first to come to mind involves a couple brighter facets of the drilling boom, which caused natural gas prices to plummet. Pair that with various tightening regulations for power plant pollution and the looming threat of greenhouse gas regulation, and you have electrical utilities across the country continuing to switch from coal to natural gas, which burns a lot cleaner, producing half the carbon dioxide and far fewer other nasties as well. While this is a terrible hit to coal-mining dependent communities like those in HCN’s North Fork Valley, it could be very good news for the climate in the short term (depending heavily, of course, on whether energy companies can eliminate the leakage of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, from production facilities and pipelines). For better or worse, the EIA now predicts that natural gas will overtake coal as the primary source of U.S. electricity by 2035.

The proliferation of drill rigs also stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest of 'fracktivism' across the West and the nation, helping lead to big, if imperfect, local, state-level, and national improvements in how the oil and gas industry is regulated and what land it has access to.

Meanwhile, a similar groundswell of activism in the Northwest helped shelve three of that coast’s six proposed coal export terminals, intended to move Montana and Wyoming coal to countries like China and help sustain the greenhouse-gassy industry as its share of the U.S. electrical supply shrinks. Now, slumping international coal prices are calling the rest of those terminals into question, too.

Looking up from inside a crevasse in New Zealand's Fox Glacier, courtesy Flickr user Robert Stokes.

Boiling down below all this, though, are the possible beginnings of a real clean-power revolution: plain old solar photovoltaic panels are rapidly becoming cost-competitive with other power sources. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, 2013 is on track to be a record-setting year in terms of residential PV installation. Add in advances in power storage technology and an increasingly friendly regulatory regime, and solar and other forms of distributed generation appear to be on the verge of undermining the very electricity production model – where political-heavyweight utilities sell power from massive centralized fossil fuel plants – that helped create our climate crisis in the first place.

Granted, solar is still a teensy part of the current overall power picture. But it has become a piercing and persistent sliver of light at the top of one of those “blue, scarier crevasses of your mind” that Craig encouraged me to write about. Perhaps someday it will grow enough to help ensure that glaciers still carve their way through the world’s higher latitude mountain ranges a century from now, ripped with deep blue crevasses that offer a glimpse into the nature of fear, mortality and even rebirth, for any brave enough to peer over their toothy edges, or descend into their depths.

Sarah Gilman is associate editor of High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryBlog Post2013/12/23 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWill drilling cost the Arctic its wildness?http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/will-drilling-cost-the-arctic-its-wildness
In the dark of a far-north winter night, amidst 70-mph winds, the nine-member crew of the tugboat Alert released its towline and set the Kulluk oilrig adrift on heaving seas. Loaded with about 139,000 gallons of diesel and 12,000 gallons of combined lubrication oil and hydraulic fluid, the Kulluk ran aground off uninhabited Sitkalidak Island 45 minutes later. It was New Year’s Eve, 2012, and the Alert and the Aiviq, another boat contracted by Royal Dutch Shell, had been towing the Kulluk from Shell’s first exploratory well in the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska’s north coast, to a Seattle shipyard, when they were caught in the terrible Gulf of Alaska storm.

Fortunately the rig didn’t spill any fuel. But the accident was just the latest in a long line of mishaps that plagued Shell’s Arctic drilling efforts last year, reports Fuel Fix, leading the company to suspend its efforts for the 2013 season. Ships drifted out of control or caught fire; a spill containment barge was damaged during certification tests after months of construction delays; air pollution violations landed the company $1.1 million in Environmental Protection Agency fines this September.

Sunset over the Chukchi Sea in 2011. Image Courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The incidents have become a primary refrain for Arctic drilling opponents leading up to the close today of the public comment period for the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s 2016 Chukchi Sea lease sale, and to the Interior Department’s long-anticipated proposed offshore Arctic drilling rules, which were recently delayed until February. Canadian officials are also evaluating proposals to drill that country’s portion of the neighboring Beaufort Sea. And a group of jailed Greenpeace activists were released on bail last week after climbing onto an offshore drilling platform belonging to Russia’s state-run Gazprom in protest of that nation’s Arctic drilling program.

The Arctic has long repelled most industrial development, despite vast reserves of oil and gas. And no wonder: As the Pew Charitable Trusts reports in its recommendations for Arctic drilling standards, released in September to help inform the U.S.’s rulemaking efforts, it’s sealed in ice 75 percent of the time, in complete darkness for three months, and

Even during the summer when the ice pack has mostly receded, (there are still) high seas, wind, freezing temperatures, dense fog, and floating ice hazards. … Anyone doing business in the Arctic needs to be prepared for self-rescue. … (but) major highways, airports, and ports … do not exist. The nearest U.S. Coast Guard air base is in Kodiak, AK, more than 950 air miles away. The nearest major port is in Dutch Harbor, AK, over 1,000 miles away. Sailing from Dutch Harbor to Barrow, AK (the point between the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic Ocean), would be similar to transiting the entire West Coast of the United States.

But the Arctic’s ability to foil human incursions is, of course, beginning to change as the surrounding region warms twice as fast as the rest of the globe, driving Arctic sea ice declines and easing access in an ironic and vicious positive feedback loop spurred by our profligate consumption of the very fuels Shell and others are so eager to extract. The company filed a revised proposal in early November to resume exploration of its Chukchi Sea leases in 2014, with five wells planned over the coming years.

Arctic sea ice extent hit a record low Sept. 16, 2012. The yellow line represents the average minimum extent over the past 30 years. Image courtesy NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio.

Despite climate change’s Arctic impacts, working in the region is still a pretty far cry from a romp through a daisy field, as Shell’s Kulluk trial demonstrates. It’s all too easy to imagine industrial ambitions colliding much more disastrously with the region’s natural violence and volatility. Some experts have warned that this is inevitable. As Pew points out, there is no proven technology for cleaning up oil spills mixed with or trapped beneath ice. If something went wrong with a well or pipeline in the deep of winter, how long would it take to address? Until the pack retreated? And this would be in one of the richest, least disturbed marine ecosystems in the world, complete with walruses, polar bears and beluga, bowhead and gray whales, not to mention the Native communities who rely on these waters for subsistence hunting and fishing.

There’s new pressure onshore in the far north as well. Canadian officials have permitted hydraulic fracturing for the first time in the Northwest Territories. And the battle over Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is back before the U.S. Congress, with Senators Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., introducing a bill in mid-November to protect its coastal plain as capital-W wilderness, while House lawmakers passed a measure that would open it to drilling.

The wildness these places still contain is difficult for me to fathom, born and raised as I was in a Colorado and a Western U.S. largely tamed by human industry and presence. Even after flying to Alaska for the first time this summer, I have only the barest grasp of its depth. The unbroken, unmarred forests and fjords that sprawled forever below the silver belly of the plane. The pair of tooth-gnashing wolverines that ran circles around each other on ridgeline above a tumbling glacier where I stood transfixed not 30 feet away, before crossing into the silence of the largest icefield in the U.S. Shielded by its harshness, the far north still has things that most of us can only imagine – salmon runs thick enough to walk across, rivers of migrating caribou, freezing seas teeming with marine mammals and fish.

Think of all that the Lower 48 once contained. The delicate sandstone cathedral of Glen Canyon. A Colorado River that jumped its banks at whim to gauge new beds for itself across the Southwest. Grizzlies in California’s Sierra. Wolves in Colorado’s Rockies. An ocean of bison on an ocean of prairie. An undammed Missouri with rapids and falls, wide as a sea. Limitless things reduced to legend and memory, grainy photographs and explorers’ accounts.

Is this where the parsing and eroding of the Arctic ultimately takes us? To a time when even its vast devouring wildness that now belongs to no one and to everyone, that belongs chiefly to itself, persists mostly in peoples’ words and pictures? I hope not. It’s better to live in a world that has voice left to tell its own stories, even if that voice is the banshee shriek of a 70-mph gale, slapping across the ocean, telling you that you don’t belong.

Sarah Gilman is the associate editor of High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman.